You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (12 page)

I use the word
relative
because every once in a while the anxiety would outrun the pills and you’d end up in the emergency room with chest pains. I’d show up and pretend to be your niece so they’d give me some information. After one of your trips to the ER, I spoke to one of the town nurses. She knew you because she came to your building to do blood pressure checks. Blood pressure has long been your favorite hobby. Do you realize how many blood pressure kits I found when I cleaned out your apartment?

“Someone needs to be in charge of his care,” she told me.

She was right. I looked around your world for candidates. Vera’s daughter certainly cared about you, but I didn’t want to suggest the position to her. What if the romance didn’t last and Vera faded out of your life, like everyone else had? Your brother lived too far away to be of any practical help, and probably would have declined anyway, based on his reaction later. From what you’ve told me, you’re more like pen pals than family—in touch for years, but not dependent on each other in any way. You didn’t know where most of your in-laws lived; they were even older than you, anyway.

I raised my hand to myself. You always joked that you’d adopted me, but now I really wanted to make our connection legal. I lobbied for health-care proxyship despite your objections for quite a while; then, with no explanation as to why you’d changed your mind, you said yes.

The document is four pages long, but essentially it gives me the authority to make your health-care decisions when you can’t, and to
ask questions about your care when you won’t. It also puts in black and white that you don’t want to be hooked up to a respirator or have any other artificial prolongation of your life.

We went to your old-fashioned locally owned bank to sign the document in front of a notary. You knew all the women who worked there; the bank was once an important stop on your flirt patrol.

“There’s my baby!” you said to a pretty assistant manager. “I had chickens in forty-five weighed more than you.”

I thought I was your only baby?

We pulled a couple of witnesses from the lobby, signed our names, watched the manager sign and notarize hers, and became as good as married—at least in the eyes of nurses and doctors.

“This is a one hundred percent kosher paper,” you declared.

Less than a year later, I needed all the power it invested.

After we signed next to the X’s, I dropped you back at your apartment. Later, I told a friend what I’d done.

“Now you have three aging parents to take care of,” she said.

Put that way, the new arrangement sounded like a burden, but I wasn’t worried. I owed you whatever you needed because you had given me something no one else ever had: a character test. Or, rather, God has given me a test in the form of you.
Here comes an old man walking toward you and your baby. Will you smile and walk away? Or will you stand and talk, bring him home, put him in your heart? Will you tell the story that his little sisters didn’t live to tell, and someday ask your children to keep his memories pulsing? Will you embrace the task or ignore it? This is your test
.

I hope I will pass.

Your hands are huge. You’re a petite man, but this mitt that I’m holding is giant. I have the rings in my jewelry box to prove it. Shortly after you moved in, you gave me your wedding band. You’d already forced me to take the rest of your collection: the ring with the black stone that looks like it came from a sinister fraternal club; the gold one with the blue stone that a mobster could get away with; and the “emerald,” though that’s not a ring anymore. When I started to think you wouldn’t be around forever, I realized I wanted something more than your summer pajamas in my attic to remember you by. The rings wouldn’t fit, so I asked if I could make the emerald one into a necklace.

“You won’t lose it?” you asked.

“No, I won’t lose it. I’m a grown-up, remember?”

How is it possible that you literally trust me with your life, but you weren’t so sure about me and the gems?

It came out nice. Did you know emerald is my birthstone? Not that I think the large chunk of green hanging from a chain around my neck is a real emerald. There’s no way you could have afforded it if it were. If anything, it’s some kind of synthetic, or a real emerald of the lowest quality. I actually think you got taken by the jewelry store. I think they sold you a ring of glass.

I love it anyway. It’s a piece of you close to my heart.

While you labored, slaved, slave-labored, your family waited for the Russians. You told me the Zychlinites thought the Russians would come to the rescue by 1941, but they still hadn’t shown up by the end of the year. The worst got worse instead.

In February of 1942, they dragged the Jewish Council, the Jewish police, and hundreds of others into the street. These people would not go to work camps or to gas chambers. They were shot right there instead.

“The police were going wild, gathering together all the Jewish policemen, standing them in a row and murdering them one by one.”

Halina Birek Tsinmon remembered this. Did you know her? She got away, too, and put her memories into the Zychlin book. Most of the stories in the book are about the good times, but Halina reported the bad.

“Hilik Zieger, with his last breath, called out ‘Yehi Am Yisrael’ (May the People of Israel Live). Oberman’s wife was sneakily enticed out of her home with the promise that she would be put in contact with her husband, and when she had walked several steps she was shot in the back, and fell to the ground. Oberman’s elderly parents suffered the same fate. Only a small child was left from the family. When a neighbor tried to take care of him, she was shot by the Germans. The little one stood crying in the frost. People were afraid to come near him. Alter’s brother was also shot.

“From hour to hour the terror increases. The police take groups of Jews to the cemetery, and there they are slaughtered in masses. The blood of the Jews flows in the sewers of the streets outside the ghetto. Dr. Winogran’s wife was murdered because they found a large diamond on her hand. She had violated German orders by not surrendering all her jewelry.”

Zieger ran the labor office that sent people like you to work. Alter was the baker who led the
Judenrat
. Oberman was the police chief. Were they shot that day, too, or had they already been arrested and hanged in prison? The few reports on record vary. Even Halina’s timeline is confusing. The story she told may have happened weeks before the end, or hours. That’s the problem with losing all the eyewitnesses. Fact-checking is a bitch.

But does it matter if the killing happened the second week in February or the first in March? It happened. This, too: After the SS shot people like your uncle in the cemetery, they trashed it. Then they carried away the gravestones, carved with Hebrew letters, and used them to build a pigsty at a nearby estate.

The Jews wouldn’t need a cemetery in Zychlin anymore. On Purim, when the children should have been parading around town in costumes, and the adults should have been raising glasses to freedom from tyranny, they all got ready to die instead.

The Nazis planned it for that normally joyous day. They took horse-drawn wagons from the farmers you used to pick fruit for. They probably used your father’s wagon. They banged the drum one last time and ordered all the remaining Jews into the square.
You’re going to work camps
, they lied. Then they loaded them onto the wagons, which took them through the snow to the train station. The trains brought them ninety miles to Chelmno, where for several months a new innovation in efficiency had been under way. Your family most likely arrived at the courtyard of a manor house that had been turned into a reception center.
You’re going to work camps
, they lied again,
so clean up
. They led them to the house where they could see to
THE WASHROOM
signs, told them to undress, and
took the things like pictures and hairbrushes that they’d held onto from their old lives.

But there was no washroom. Instead they were herded down a ramp and into the backs of vans. Fifty or more people were stuffed into each truck. The driver would turn on the gas, climb out of the van, and crawl underneath it so he could thread the exhaust pipe directly into the locked and sealed back chamber. The truck beds filled with gas. The people filled with gas. It took some of them ten minutes to suffocate. It’s been written that the guards complained about that. People taking so long to die tend to make a mess, and someone had to clean it. When the screaming stopped, the driver climbed back into the truck and drove it to a mass grave for unloading.

There are no records of all those killed at Chelmno. It was so deadly that of the approximately 49,400 video testimonies that Jewish survivors gave to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, only 34 mentioned Chelmno. By comparison, Auschwitz is remembered 13,207 times. But not everyone who lived made one of those tapes, including you. So I like to fantasize that your fourteen-year-old sister, Sarah, ran away and lived at least a few more months in the woods, or that your sister-in-law hid with the baby in a Zychlin sewer, and that little girl is alive somewhere, seventy years old now, and still hoping to meet a blood relative like you.

It happened again today: a reminder that I’m the most ignorant Jew in the room. I was in the dining hall of a mostly Jewish college after a campus tour with Carrie. We’d taken food from the non-kosher side of the cafeteria, but found seats closer to the kosher section. When it was time to leave, I found the tray-return area a few strides from our table. I threw my napkin into a trash can and just as I was about to put my plate on the conveyor belt that brings the dirty stuff to the dishwashers, a food-service guy scolded me.

“You can’t put that here!” he said, his tone disgracing me. It took me a few seconds to realize that this was the kosher discard area, and I’d almost mingled non-kosher dishes with kosher ones, a rule I knew but hadn’t thought about. I’d almost sullied the entire operation! Who knows what the result would have been: ritual boiling of each plate? Some kind of holy fire pit?

This is one of the main reasons I don’t like being Jewish: It makes me feel stupid. I don’t read Hebrew, though God actually knows how hard I’ve tried. Despite dropping out of Hebrew school as a kid, I took adult Hebrew classes when the kids were little, but I sucked at those, too. After fifteen classes, all I’d absorbed was that the Hebrew letters
shin
and
sin
sound different. Or look different. I can’t even remember now.

I don’t know when to bend during services. Why does everyone else, even my kids, know when to bend their knees and lean forward during which prayer? I just dip quickly for a few beats after everyone else, which is embarrassing. I don’t even know what to call the place where we pray anymore. It used to be
temple
, but now I hear it called
shul
or
synagogue
more often. That makes me feel stupid, too. So much about Judaism makes me feel stupid. Who wants to feel that way on a regular basis?

I sometimes consider switching teams. I spent a Sunday morning in a Baptist church, the kind with women in gorgeous hats and men in bow ties. The kind with a sublime choir and lots of collectively hollered
Amens
. The kind whose message is not one of guilt.

“God loves you! Have a great week!” seemed to be the gist of all the prayers. I left feeling praised, blessed—good about myself.

I listen to a Unitarian church service on Sunday-morning radio. It’s much quieter than black church, but it’s inspiring. The sermons encourage fighting for justice, being a good citizen of the Earth, enjoying life. Judaism tries to convey similar messages, but with so much guilt and fear mixed in, it’s hard to hear it all.

My rabbi tells me I shouldn’t feel bad about my ignorance. He gave a sermon once that implied that Reform Judaism values following
the Golden Rule much more than specific rules. He said you don’t have to know Hebrew to be a good Jew. I appreciated the words, which were surely intended to comfort people like me and make us feel more welcomed. But the message didn’t cut through my insecurity. I go to services less and less now, but I haven’t been able to cancel my membership. Not after what my temple mates did for you.

You walked to the first camp. You, Bill, Mendel, and about twenty other strong young men—although after a year of malnutrition, the strength would have been relative.

The place was called Hardt. At least that’s what you told me. The problem with tracking your whereabouts from 1941 to 1945 is that the place names you’ve given me are different from the place names officially listed in books about labor camps. Or they’re not in the books at all, which certainly doesn’t mean you weren’t there. Turns out that the legend about Nazis being unimpeachable record-keepers is a bit exaggerated.